Morthylla

Clark Ashton Smith

In Umbri , City of the Delta, the lights blazed with a garish brilliance after the setting of that sun which
was now a coal-red decadent star, grown old beyond chronicle, beyond legend. Most brilliant, most
garish of all were the lights that illumed the house of the ageing poet Famurza , whose Anacreontic songs
had brought him the riches that he disbursed in orgies for his friends and sycophants. Here, in porticoes,
halls and chambers the cressets were thick as stars in a cloudless fault. It seemed that Famurza wished to
dissipate all shadows, except those in arrased alcoves set apart for the fitful amours of his guests.

For the kindling of such amours there were wines, cordials, aphrodisiacs. There were meats and fruits
that swelled the flaccid pulses. There were strange exotic drugs that amused and prolonged pleasure.
There were curious statuettes in half-veiled niches; and wall panels painted with bestial loves, or loves
human or

superhuman. There were hired singers of all sexes, who sang ditties diversely erotic; and dancers whose
contortions were calculated to restore the outworn sense when all else had failed.

But to all such incitants Valzain , pupil of Famurza , and renowned both as poet and voluptuary, was
insensible.

With indifference turning toward disgust, a half-emptied cup in his hand, he watched from a corner the
gala throng that eddied past him, and averted his eyes involuntarily from certain couples who were too
shameless or drunken to seek the shadows of privacy for their dalliance. A sudden satiety had claimed
him. He felt himself strangely withdrawn from the morass of wine and flesh into which, not long before, he
had still plunged with delight. He seemed as one who stands on an alien shore, beyond waters of
deepening separation.

"What ails you, Valzain ? Has a vampire sucked your blood?" It was Famurza , flushed.gray-haired ,
slightly corpulent, who stood at his elbow. Laying an affectionate hand on Valzain's shoulder, he hoisted
aloft withthe other that fescenninely graven quart goblet from which he was wont to drink onIy wine,

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eschewing the drugged

andviolent liquors often preferred by the sybarites of Umbri

"Is it billiousness ?Or unrequited love? We have cures here for both. You have only to name your
medicine"

"There is no medicine for what ails me," countered Valzain . "As for love, I have ceased to care whether
itbe requited or unrequited. I can taste only the dregs in every cup. And tedium lurks at the middle of all
kisses"

"Truly, yours is a melancholy case." There was concern in Famurza's voice. "I have been reading some
of your late verses. You write only of tombs and yew trees, of maggots and phantoms and disembodied
love. Such stuff gives me thecolic, I need at least a half-gallon of honest vine juice after each poem."

"Though I did not know it till lately," admitted Valzain , "there is in me a curiosity toward the unseen, a
longing for things beyond the material world."

Famurzashook his head commiserately . "Though I have attained to more than twice your years, I am still
content with what I see and hear and touch. Good juicy meat, women, wine, the songs of full-throated
singers, are enough for me."

"In the drums of slumber,"mused Valzain . "I have clasped succubi who were more than flesh, have
known delights too keen for the waking body to sustain. Do such dreams have any source, outside the
earthborn brain itself? I would give much to find that source, if it exists. In the meanwhile there is nothing
for me but despair."

"So young -- and yet so exhausted! Well, if you're tired of women, and want phantoms instead, I might
venture a suggestion. Do you know the old necropolis, lying midway between Umbri and Psiom -- a
matter of perhaps three miles from here? The goatherds say that a lamia haunts it -- the spirit of the
princess Morthylla , who

diedseveral centuries ago and was interred in a mausoleum that still stands, overtowering the lesser
tombs. Why not go forth tonight and visit the necropolis? It should suit your mood better than my house.
And perhaps Morthylla will appear to you. But don't blame me if you don't return at all. After all those
years the lamia is

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stillavid for human lovers; aad she might well take a fancy to you."

"Of course, I know the place," said Valzain ... "But I think you are jesting."

Famurzashrugged his shoulders and moved on amid the revelers. A laughing dancer, blonde-limbed and
lissom , came up to Valzain and threw a noose of plaited flowers about his neck, claiming him as her
captive. He broke the noose gently, and gave the girl a tepid kiss that caused her to make wry faces.
Unobtrusively but quickly, before others of the merrymakers could try to entice him, he left the house of
Famurza .

Without impulses, other than that of an urgent desire for solitude, he turned his steps toward the suburbs,
avoiding the neighborhood of taverns and lupanars , where the populace thronged. Music, laughter,
snatches of songs, followed him from lighted mansions where symposia were held nightly by the city's
richer denizens. But he

metfew roisters on the streets: it was too late for the gathering, too early for the dispersal, of guests at
such symposia.

Now the lights thinned out, with ever-widening intervals between, and the streets grew shadowy with
that ancient night which pressed about Umbri , and would wholly quench its defiant galaxies of
lamp-bright window with the darkening of Zothique's senescent sun. Of such things, and of death's
encircling mystery, were the

musingsof Valzain as he plunged into the outer darkness that he found grateful to his glare-wearied eyes.

Grateful too was the silence of the field-bordered road that he pursued for awhile without realizing its
direction. Then, at some landmark familiar despite the gloom, it came to him that the road was the one
which ran from Umbri to Psiom , that sister city of the Delta; the road beside whose middle meanderings
was situated the

long-disusednecropolis to which Famurza had ironically directed him.

Truly, he thought, the earthly-minded Famurza had somehow plumbed the need that lay at the bottom of
his disenchantment with all sensory pleasures. It would be good to visit, to sojourn for an hour or so, in
that city whose people had long passed beyond the lusts of mortality, beyond satiety and disillusion.

A moon, swelling from the crescent toward the half, arose behind him as he reached the foot of the

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lowmounded hill on which the cemetery lay. He left the paved road, and began to ascend the slope,
half-covered with stunted gorse, at whose summit the glimmering marbles were discernible. It was
without path, other than the

brokentrails made by goats and their herders. Dim, lengthened and attenuate, his shadow went before
him, like a ghostly guide. In his fantasy it seemed to him that he climbed the gently sloping bosom of a
giantess, studded afar with pale gems that were tombstones and mausoleuns . He caught himself
wondering, amid this poetic whimsy, whether the giantess was dead, or merely slept.

Gaining the flat expansive ground of the summit, where dwarfish dying yews disputed with leafless briars
the intervals of slabs blotched with lichen, he recalled the tale that Famurza had mentioned, anent the
lamia who was said to haunt the necropolis. Famurza , he knew well, was no believer in such legendry,
and had meant only to mock his funereal mood. Yet, as a poet will, he began to play with the fancy of
some presence, immortal, lovely and evil, that dwelt amid the antique marbles and would respond to the
evocation of one who, without positive belief, had longed vainly for visions from beyond mortality.

Through headstone aisles of moon-touched solitude, he came to a lofty mausoleum, still standing with
few signs of ruin at the cemetery's center. Beneath it, he had been told, were extensive vaults housing the
mummies of an extinct royal family that had ruled over the twin cities Umbri and Psiom in former
centuries. The princess

Morthyllahad belonged to this family.

To his startlement a woman, or what appeared to be such, was sitting on a fallen shaft beside the
mausoleum. He could not see her distinctly; the tomb's shadow still enveloped her from the shoulders
downward. The face alone, glimmering wanly, was lifted to the rising moonIts profile was such as he had
seen on antique coins.

"Who are you?" he asked, with a curiosity that over powered his courtesy.

"I am the lamia Morthylla ," she replied, in a voice that left behind it a faint and elusive vibration like that
of some briefly sounded harp. "Beware me -- for my kisses

areforbidden to those who would remain numbered among the living."

Valzainwas startled by this answer that echoed his fantasies. Yet reason told him that the apparition was
no spirit of the tombs but a living woman who knew the legend of Morthylla and wished to amuse herself
by teasing him. And yet what woman would venture alone and at night to a place so desolate and eerie?

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Most credibly, she was a wanton who had come out to keep a rendezvous amid the tombs. There were,
he knew, certain perverse debauchees who required sepulchral surroundings and furnishings for the
titillation of their desires.

"Perhaps you are waiting for some one," he suggested. "I do not wish to intrude, if such is the case."

"I wait only for him who is destined to come. And I have waited long, having had no lover for two
hundred years. Remain, if you wish: there is no one to fear but me."

Despite the rational surmises he had formed, there crept along Valzain's spine the thrill of one who,
without fully believing, suspects the presence of a thing beyond nature... Yet surely it was all a game -- a
game that he too could play for the beguilement of his ennui.

"I came here hoping to meet you," he declared.."I am weary of mortal women, tired of every pleasure --
tired even of poetry."

"I, too, am bored," she said, simply.

The moon had climbed higher, shining on the dress of antique mode that the woman wore. It was cut
closely at waist and hips and bosom, with voluminous downward folds. Valzain had seen such costumes
only in old drawings. The princess Morthylla , dead for three centuries, might well have worn a similar
dress.

Whoever she might be, he thought, the woman was strangely beautiful, with a touch of quaintness in the
heavily coiled hair whose color he could not decide in the moonlight. There wasa sweetness about her
mouth, a shadow of fatigue.or sadness beneath her eyes. At the right corner of her lips he discerned a
small mole.

Valzain'smeeting with the self-named Morthylla was repeated nightly while the moon swelled like the
rounding breast of a titaness and fell away once more to hollowness and senescence. Always she awaited
him by the same mausoleum which, she declared, was her dwelling place. And always she dismissed him
when the east turned ashen with dawn, saying that she was a creature of the night.

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Skeptical at first, he thought of her as a person with macabre leanings and fantasies akin to his own, with
whom he was carrying on a flirtation of singular charm. Yet about her he could find no hint of the
worldliness that he suspected: no seeming knowledge of present things, but a weird familiarity with the
past and the lamia's legend. More and more she seemed a nocturnal being, intimate only with shadow
and solitude.

Her eyes, her lips, appeared to withhold secrets forgotten and forbidden. In her vague, ambiguous
answers to his questions, he read meanings that thrilled him with hope and fear.

"I have dreamed of life," she told him cryptically. "And I have dreamed also of death. Now, perhaps
there is another dream -- into which you have entered."

"I, too, would dream," said Valzain .

Night after night his disgust and weariness sloughed away from him, in a fascination fed by the spectral
milieu, the environing silence of the dead, his withdrawal and separation from the carnal, garish city. By
degrees, by alternations of unbelief and belief, he came to accept her as the actual lamia. The hunger that
he sensed in her,

couldbe only the lamia's hunger; her beauty that of a being no longer human. It was like a dreamer's
acceptance of things fantastic elsewhere than in sleep.

Together with his belief, there grew his love for her. The desires he had thought dead revived within him,
wilder, more importunate.

She seemed to love him in return. Yet she betrayed no sign of the lamia's legendary nature, eluding his
embrace, refusing him the kisses for which he begged.

"Sometime, perhaps," she conceded. "But first you must know me for what I am, must love me without
illusion.'

"Kill me with your lips, devour me as you are said to have devoured other lovers," beseeched Valzain .

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"Can you not wait?" her smile was sweet -- and tantalizing. "I do not wish your death so soon, for I love
you too well. Is it not sweet to keep your tryst among the sepulchres ? Have I not beguiled you from
your boredom? Must you end it all?"

The next night he besought her again, imploring with all his ardor and eloquence the denied
consummation.

She mocked him: "Perhaps I am merely a bodiless phantom, a spirit without substance. Perhaps you
have dreamed me. Would you risk an awakening from the dream?"

Valzainstepped toward her, stretching out his arms in a passionate gesture. She drew back, saying:

"What if I should turn to ashes and moonlight at your touch? You would regret then your rash
insistence."

"You are the immortal lamia," avowed Valzain . "My senses tell me that you are no phantom, no
disembodied spirit. But for me you have turned all else to shadow."

"Yes, I am real enough in my fashion," she granted, laughing softly. Then suddenly she leaned toward him
and her lips touched his throat. He felt their moist warmth a moment -- and felt the sharp sting of her
teeth that barely pierced his skin, withdrawing instantly. Before he could clasp her she eluded him again.

"It is the only kiss permitted to us at present," she cried, and fled swiftly with soundless footfalls among
the gleams and shadows of the sepulchres .

On the following afternoon a matter of urgent and unwelcome business called Valzain to the neighboring
city of Psiom: a brief journey, but one that he seldom took.

He passed the ancient necropolis, longing for that nocturnal hour when he could hasten once more to a
meeting with Morthylla . Her poignant kiss, which had drawn a few drops of blood, had left him greatly
fevered and distraught. He, like that place of tombs, was haunted; and the haunting went with him into

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Psiom .

He had finished his business, the borrowing of a sum of money from a usurer. Standing at the usurer's
door, with that slightly obnoxious but necessary person beside him, he saw a woman passing on the
street.

Her features, though not her dress, were those of Morthylla ; and there was even the same tiny mole at
one corner of her mouth. No phantom of the cemetery could have startled or dismayed him more
profoundly.

"Who is that woman?he asked the moneylender. "Do you know her?"

"Her name is Beldith . She is well-known in Psiom , being rich in her own right and having had numerous
lovers. I've had a little business with her, though she owes me nothing at present. Should you care to
meet her? I can easily introduce you."

"Yes, I should like to meet her," agreed Valzain . "She looks strangely like someone that I knew a long
time ago.

The usurer peered slyly at the poet. "She might not make too easy a conquest. It is said of late that she
has withdrawn herself from the pleasures of the city. Some have seen her going out at night toward the
old necropolis, or returning from it in the early dawn. Strange tastes, I'd say, for one who is little more
than a harlot. But perhaps she goes out to meet some eccentric lover."

"Direct me to her house," Valzain requested. "I shall not need you to introduce me."

"As you like."The moneylender shrugged, looking a little disappointed. "It's not far, anyway."

Valzainfound the house quickly. The woman Beldith was alone. Shemeet him with a wistful and troubled
smile that left no doubt of her identity.

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"I perceive that you have learned the truth," she said "I had meant to tell you soon, for the deception
could not have gone on much longer. Will you not forgive me?"

"I forgive you," returned Valzain sadly. "But why did you deceive me?"

"Because you desired it.A woman tries to please the man whom she loves; and in all love there is more
or less deception.

"Like you, Valzain , I had grown tired of pleasure. And I sought the solitude of the necropolis, so remote
from carnal things. You too came, seeking solitude and peace -- or some unearthly specter. I recognized
you at once. And I had read your poems. Knowing Morthylla's legend, I sought to play a game with you.
Playing it, I grew to love you... Valzain , you loved me as the lamia. Can you not now love me for
myself?"

"It cannot be," averred the poet. "I fear to repeat the disappointment I have found in other women. Yet
at least I am grateful for the hours you gave me. They were the best I have known -- even though I have
loved something that did not, and could not, exist. Farewell, Morthylla . Farewell, Beldith ."

When he had gone, Beldith stretched herself face downward among the cushions of her couch. She
wept a little; and the tears made a dampness that quickly dried. Later she arose briskly enough and went
about her household business.

After a time she returned to the loves and revelries of Psiom . Perhaps, in the end, she found such peace
as may be given to those who have grown too old for pleasure.

But for Valzain there was no peace, no balm for this last and most bitter of disillusionments. Nor could
he return to the carnalities of his former life. So it was that he finally slew himself, stabbing his throat to its
deepest vein with a keen knife in the same spot which the false lamia's teeth had bitten, drawing a little
blood.

After his death, he forgot that he had died; forgot the immediate past with all its happenings and
circumstances.

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Following his talk with Famurza , he had gone forth from Famurza's house and from the city of Umbri
and had taken the road that passed the abandoned cemetery. Seized by an impulse to visit it, he had
climbed the slope toward the marbles under a swelling moon that rose behind him.

Gaining the flat expansive ground of the summit, where dwarfish dying yews disputed with leafless briars
the intervals of slabs blotched with lichen, he recalled the tale that Famurza had mentioned, anent the
lamia who was said to haunt the necropolis. Famurza , he knew well, was no believer in such legendry,
and had meant only to mock his funereal mood. Yet, as a poet will, he began to play with the fancy of
some presence, immortal, lovely and evil, that dwelt amid the antique marbles and would respond to the
evocation of one who, without positive belief, had longed vainly for visions from beyond mortality.

Through headstone aisles of moon-touched solitude, he came to a lofty mausoleum, still standing with
few signs of ruin at the cemetery's center. Beneath it, he had been told, were extensive vaults housing the
mummies of an extinct royal family that had ruled over the twin cities Umbri and Psiom in former
centuries. The princess

Morthyllahad belonged to this family.

To his startlement a woman, or what appeared to be such, was sitting on a fallen shaft beside the
mausoleum. He could not see her distinctly; the tomb's shadow still enveloped her from the shoulders
downward. The face alone, glimmering wanly, was lifted to the rising moonIts profile was such as he had
seen on antique coins.

"Who are you?" he asked, with a curiosity that over powered his courtesy.

"I am the lamia Morthylla ," she replied.

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